Study Reveals Best Age to Get Married to Avoid Divorce

We’ve always heard that the older you are when you get married, the lower your chances for divorce. But a fascinating new study suggests that after a certain age, the risk of divorce starts to rise again.

According to sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the University of Utah, the risk of divorce steadily declines from your teens into your late 20s, but sometime in the early 30s it starts to rise again. Wolfinger says: “Those who tie the knot after their early thirties are not more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late twenties.”

Here’s Wolfinger’s explanation: Generally speaking, you’re still figuring out who you are and what you want in your teens and 20s; so the person who was perfect for you at 19 may not seem so perfect when you’re 30. For those marrying later in life, Wolfinger says there’s a selection effect happening – some people who wait a long time to get married may simply not be the marrying type and/or they are facing “a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony.”

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The important thing to remember is that just because you wait until your 40s to get married, doesn’t mean your relationship is doomed. In fact, the research still shows that waiting until later in life is still the wiser option. (Wolfinger found that people who married at age 35 or older had a 19 percent risk of divorce, compared to a 20 percent risk for those aged 20 to 24, and a 32 percent risk for those married before the age of 20.) It’s also important to note that overall divorce rates are still on a 30-year decline from their peak in the early 1980s.

While further research is still needed to figure out what all this means for the demographics going forward, the main point that Wolfinger wants to make is that “we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who marry in their thirties are now at a greater risk of divorce than are people who wed in their late twenties. This is a new development.”

Curated Article and Photo Credit from The Washington Post

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